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The word ‘eponym’ is derived from the
Greek ‘epi’ which roughly means ‘upon’
or ‘ in addit ion’, and ‘onyma’ which
means ‘name’.
Strictly speaking, an eponym is the name of
the person who can be real or imaginary, from
which the name of something else is derived.
Thus, Romulus is the eponym for Rome; the
Emperor Constantine I or Constantine the
Great is the eponym of Constantinople; and
Queen Victoria is the eponym for Victorian
architecture.
Some of the earliest uses of eponyms were
by the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans, who
named their years after their magistrates and
consuls, respectively. Thus, the year 59 BC would
have been known to the Greeks as Leucius, and to
the Romans as Marcus Bibulus and Julius Caesar
(two consuls were elected each year).
In contemporary English, the term eponym
has also been used to refer to something which
is self-titled, for example, the book My Life:
Bill Clinton could be described as Bill Clinton’s
eponymous book; and Gray’s Anatomy could be
described as Henry Gray’s eponymous book.
Peculiarly, in the Sciences, and particularly
in Medicine, the term eponym is general ly
understood to mean something (like a disease or
device in medicine) which has been named after a
person. These eponyms are generally understood
to honour the discoverer. Thus the diesel engine
is named after a German engineer Rudolf Diesel
who invented a type of internal combustion
engine that used compression ignition, and who
patented it in 1893. Or Asimov’s three laws of
robotics, who first introduced them in his 1942
short story Runaround. Sometimes, eponyms are
used to honour not the discoverer, but to honour
someone who is prominent in a particular field.
For instance, the Hale telescope at the Palomar
Observatory in California was not built by the
astronomer Gregory Hale in the 1940s, but he
was instrumental in securing a grant to build
it.
In the case of the diesel engine, it is possible
that the engine was wrongly attributed to Di